Nobody Begs for Dirty Water

I think it’s important to note that the Congress has cut the [Environmental Protection] Agency quite a bit before you got there. Quite a bit recently, in relative terms. And so, speaking only for myself, I would expect to take those cuts into account and echo my colleague’s sentiments about you may be the first person to get more than you asked for. Because, quite frankly, as many people have made the point, nobody is standing on the rooftops begging for dirty water, dirty air, dirty soil, and those sorts of things.

This week everybody was talking about the apparent failure of TrumpCare

The Senate’s TrumpCare bill changed several times this week, and all the versions failed to get 50 of the 52 Republican senators to approve moving forward. This issue is never over, because Republicans agree that they have to do something, but they can’t agree on what.

I could almost feel sorry for them if they hadn’t done this to themselves. They ran on some unspecified “replacement” for ObamaCare that Trump promised would cover everybody better and cheaper. It’s now clear that no such plan ever existed, and that Trump has never had two consecutive coherent thoughts about healthcare. So either Republicans do nothing and look ineffective, or they do something that falls way short of the expectations they built up.

Their position was designed for undermining President Clinton, who would bail them out with a veto the same way Obama always did. Trump wasn’t supposed to win.

But beyond this particular no-win moment, Republican free-market rhetoric is unsuited to healthcare in a more basic way. Markets don’t see people, they see money. So if you can’t afford to pay for what you want, your desires are invisible. (The corresponding economic concept is effective demand; wanting something you can’t afford isn’t effective in a market economy.)

That’s why the market will never provide affordable effective healthcare for the poor and lower working class. At best, they’ll be left facing the kinds of trade-offs no one should have to make: Do you send the kids to school with clothes they’ve outgrown over the summer, or do you pay the health insurance premium? A lot of people facing such a dilemma will “choose” to take a chance on staying healthy. If they lose that gamble, the market would let them die.

But that’s not the kind of society most Americans want to live in. On most issues, we’re willing to let the market allocate goods and services. I’m willing to accept, for example, that my desire for seafront property is ineffective. Richer people can have the ocean views and private jets and varieties of wine that I will never taste. I’m fine with that. But when we’re talking about who lives and who dies, money shouldn’t be the deciding factor.

The only way to change that situation is to put in government money. Republicans are still struggling with that basic fact, which is why they can’t come up with any reasonable plan.

The Senate parliamentarian just made ObamaCare repeal that much harder: Several provisions of the current bill, including the anti-abortion ones, don’t fit under the reconciliation rules that avoid filibuster. So they need 60 votes rather than 50, which they’re not going to get.

and whether Trump will accept being investigated

Almost every day last week, something new came out that increased the odds of the Constitutional-crisis nightmare scenario: Trump scuttles the Mueller investigation, pardons anybody in his administration who might have done something wrong (including himself), and leaves Congress to either accept this fait accompli or impeach him. I still don’t think this is the most probable scenario (though Josh Marshall does), but it’s way more likely than I’m comfortable with.

Wednesday, Trump was interviewed in the Oval Office by three New York Times reporters, revealing that he thought it would be a “red line” if Special Counsel Robert Mueller investigated his finances (which Bloomberg was simultaneously revealing that Mueller is doing), and lambasting Attorney General Sessions for doing the ethical thing by recusing himself from an investigation where he might become a target. Thursday, the NYT revealed that Trump’s defense team is investigating Mueller and his people for conflicts of interest they can use to discredit the investigation or maybe justify shutting it down, and WaPo reported that Trump was looking into pardons, even possibly pardoning himself. (Experts disagree: Would that be unconstitutional, or did the framers just regard it as unthinkable?) Friday it came out that Jeff Sessions might still not have come clean about his meetings with the Russian ambassador.

Will Sessions hang on as attorney general? If he goes, will Trump replace him with someone he can count on to fire Mueller? Will the Senate go for that? Will they OK Trump’s FBI pick? What will Jared Kushner reveal in his testimony today? What about Don Jr. and Paul Manafort?

Why does this all feel like we’re building up to a season-ending cliffhanger?

Dahlia Lithwick is Slate‘s top law writer, but she writes an illuminating piece about the limits of law to control people like Trump.

The rule of law is precisely as robust as our willingness to fight for it. And to fight for it is not quite the same thing as to ask, “Isn’t there a law?” While a nation founded on laws and not men is a noble aspiration, I am not certain that what the Framers anticipated was a constitutional regime predicated on the Harry Potter hope that all the lawyers would fix all the stuff while everyone else crossed their fingers and prayed. … What is increasingly clear is that Trump’s lawlessness isn’t a problem to be solved by other people’s attorneys. Like it or not, we are all public interest lawyers now.

Friday Sean Spicer resigned and hedge-fund manager Anthony Scaramucci became communicators director, because apparently if you can make money, you can do anything. (I know it’s an ethnic stereotype, but Scaramucci really does look like a Sopranos character. Maybe Spicer isn’t the wartime consigliere Trump believes he needs.) Sarah Huckabee Sanders moves up to press secretary, a job she was occasionally filling anyway.

Senate Intelligence Chair Richard Burr seems unimpressed by one of the fake controversies Trump defenders have spun out of the Russia inquiry: that Obama’s National Security Adviser Susan Rice improperly “unmasked” the names of people whose conversations were captured by the NSA. Blaming his House counterpart, Burr told CNN: “The unmasking thing was all created by Devin Nunes.”

Journalism Professor Jay Rosen takes a deeper look at Trump’s NYT interview. All the assumptions of the political interview, he tweets, are out the window with Trump:

One premise of interviewing a public official is that the official is more “in the know” than the journalist. Everything the Times reporters asked about health care shredded that premise. He knows far less than the people seeking answers from him!

When a subject says something confusing or wrong, you usually hope that the interviewer asks a follow-up question. But Trump’s speaking style (in which he rarely produces a complete, coherent idea, and is more likely to interrupt his own train of thought than to elaborate) makes that tactic useless.

the most likely outcome of seeking clarification by way of a follow-up is that he will introduce some new and further confusion.

But Rosen also points to a more fundamental confusion: Trump’s entire sense of self depends on being seen by others. So in an interview he isn’t presenting himself so much as making himself.

You don’t get a sense that he’s explaining what existed prior to its being asked about in the interview— or that it will persist after.

One of the benefits of living in New Hampshire is that you get to see presidential candidates close up. Of all the candidates I’ve seen since I started going to these campaign events in 2000, the one who connected with a room the best is John McCain. He’s personable, loves to answer questions, and has an impressive range of knowledge. Even as a liberal, I would always come away trying to rationalize voting for him. (In the 2000 primary, I crossed over and voted for him against Bush. Given how the Bush administration turned out, I’m not sorry.) I saw him several times in both the 2000 and 2008 cycles, and the quality of his performance never wavered.

At a 2008 rally in Minnesota, he did the last magnanimous thing I can remember a Republican presidential candidate doing: When an elderly woman started talking about not trusting Obama because he’s “an Arab” and (by implication) a Muslim terrorist sympathizer, McCain interrupted and corrected her before she could spread any more falsehoods about his opponent: “No, ma’am. He’s a decent family man [and] citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues and that’s what this campaign’s all about.”

but you should pay more attention to Iran

In 2015, the Obama administration worked out a deal with Iran: We and our allies would relax our economic sanctions and let Iran access its money that we had frozen in our banking system, and in exchange Iran would stop its nuclear-weapons program, shut down a bunch of centrifuges, turn over its stash of weapon-ready radioactive material, and permit inspections to give us confidence that they weren’t restarting it all. Every 90 days the President is supposed to report to Congress on whether Iran is upholding its end of the deal.

During the campaign Trump regularly attacked this deal, though there was no indication that he understood it any better than he understood any of the other stuff he talked about. (Where is that marvelous healthcare plan he promised?) Speaking to a pro-Israel group, he said, “My number-one priority is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran.”

To keep that promise, all Trump has to do is report to Congress that Iran isn’t complying, and ask them to reinstate sanctions. But Iran is upholding the deal. Rex Tillerson’s State Department says so, and the other defense-and-foreign-policy adults in the administration — Defense Secretary James Mattis, National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Joseph Dunford — agree. Facing that united front, Trump felt like he had no choice this week; he verified Iran’s compliance.

But Trump hates having his actions dictated by experts and their “facts”. So Foreign Policy reports that he has instructed White House staffers to work around Tillerson.

Withholding certification “wasn’t a real option available to me,” Trump reportedly told the staffers. “Make sure that’s not the case 90 days from now.”

Here’s the problem with that course: The original sanctions worked because Secretary of State Clinton convinced a significant international coalition (including Russia, China, and the EU) to cooperate. That coalition isn’t likely to reinstate sanctions just because Trump says so. So after he blows up this deal, Trump will be in a weaker negotiating position than Obama was.

and you also might be interested in …

Was it the massive street demonstrations? Pressure from the rest of the EU? A rift in the ruling party? Whatever the cause, I’ll take it: Polish President Andrzej Duda vetoed two bills that would have given the authoritarian ruling party nearly complete control of the judiciary.

Thursday, it was hard to avoid coverage of O. J. Simpson, who got paroled from the armed robbery charge that has kept him in prison the last nine years. I have nothing against O.J. personally, but I don’t want to hear about him any more. If he has a quiet, happy old age that never again makes headlines, that would be fine with me.

538’s Perry Bacon has an educational piece about stories with unnamed sources: As a journalistic insider, when does he take such stories seriously and when not.

“This is a momentous decision,” said a current official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a covert program. “Putin won in Syria.”

In general, Syria is a mess and intelligent people can disagree about what we should be doing there. I just wish I could be confident that our new policy is based on someone’s vision of American interests, rather than paying off whatever debt Trump owes Putin.

The Under Secretary shall be appointed by the President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, from among distinguished scientists with specialized training or significant experience in agricultural research, education, and economics.

We’ll see if the Senate allows this. Sam Clovis has a bachelor’s degree in political science and a doctorate in public administration. He was the Iowa campaign chair for another know-nothing Trump appointee: Energy Secretary (and custodian of the nuclear arsenal) Rick Perry.

Another nominee: Andrew Wheeler to be the second-in-command at EPA. Wheeler is a coal-industry lobbyist and a former aide to Senator Inhofe, who famously disproved global warming by bringing a snowball to the floor of the Senate.

Joel Clement is a government scientist who is blowing the whistle on the administration’s attempt to get its scientists to leave.

Comments

I am puzzled by your comment about O.J. Simpson: “If he has a quiet, happy old age that never again makes headlines, that would be fine with me.” How about if he pays the massive judgment he owes to the Goldman family from causing the wrongful death of Ron Goldman? The fact that he escaped criminal penalties for the murder of Goldman and Nicole Brown, doesn’t mean he should get to avoid paying what he owes (as he had successfully done up to now). By the way, his criminal conviction for theft involved his sports memorabilia, the sale of which had kept him enjoying a reduced but comfortable lifestyle.

There’s the precedent of President Ford pardoning President Nixon for “for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9,1974.”